How should construction project files be organised?

Decide the architecture before the files arrive

Folder structure is one of the few things on a project that is nearly free to get right at the start and nearly impossible to fix later. Set it at mobilisation, in the shape the team already uses — by discipline, by package, by zone, or a deliberate combination.

The test is not whether the structure is elegant. It is whether somebody who joined last week can guess where a file lives on the first try.

Naming is a filing decision, not a formatting one

A filename is metadata that travels with the file, which makes it the one piece of context that survives being copied somewhere else.

• Put the discriminating information first — what it is, what it belongs to, and which version — not the date the software happened to add.
• Never rely on "final", "final2" or "latest". They are not versions; they are a record of somebody losing track.
• Keep the convention short enough that people follow it under pressure. A naming standard nobody uses on a bad Friday is a naming standard nobody uses.

The folder is only half of it

Filing tells you where a file is. Linkage tells you what it means. The photographs attach to the inspection they document; the calculation attaches to the RFI it answers; the deck attaches to the meeting whose minutes reference it.

Two years later the question is almost never "where is that file". It is "what was this decision based on" — and only the second question has money attached to it. A file standing next to its decision answers it. A file in a very tidy folder does not.